A UPMC hospital is undergoing a two-part trial over SEIU’s allegations that the company committed unfair labor practices. The first case involves the charge that UPMC management conducted interrogations and surveillance of organizing activity and made implied threats of discipline and arrest. NLRB judges have not yet issued a ruling for that case. The second case involves SEIU’s claim that UPMC is one entity, and therefore vulnerable to unionization, which the UPMC denies because it claims that each...

The federal government is spending nearly $1 million to create an online database that will track “misinformation” and hate speech on Twitter. The National Science Foundation is financing the creation of a web service that will monitor “suspicious memes” and what it considers “false and misleading ideas,” with a major focus on political activity online. The “Truthy” database, created by researchers at Indiana University, is designed to “detect political smears, astroturfing, misinformation, and other social pollution.” The university has received $...

Earlier, we discussed President Obama’s recent Executive Order 13,673, which “will allow trial lawyers to extort larger settlements from companies, and enable bureaucratic agencies to extract costly settlements over conduct that may have been perfectly legal.”

But it turns out that President Obama’s executive order (which allows the Labor Department to cut off firms’ government contracts over state or federal employment law verdicts or fines against them) has another, more ironic effect: It penalizes companies based in states...

In the fifth century BCE, famous Greek tragedian Euripides supposedly said, “where this no wine there is no love.” This certainly holds true in present day Pennsylvania, which has one of the nation’s strictest alcohol regulatory regimes. And according to Tom Wark, executive director for the American Wine Consumer Coalition, Pennsylvania is “the worst state to live in if you're a wine lover." In Philadelphia, one man surely isn’t feeling the brotherly love after police raided his home and seized 2,426 bottles of rare wine—with an estimated value of more than $125,...

“Bank of America failed to make accurate and complete disclosure to investors and its illegal conduct kept investors in the dark,” declared a government official in a Department of Justice press release announcing yesterday’s record settlement in which Bank of America agreed to fork over $16.65 billion to settle charges it and companies it had purchased had deceived investors.

Back in Washington from Ferguson, Mo., Attorney General Eric Holder announced at a press conference: “As part of this settlement, Bank of America has acknowledged that, in the years leading up to the financial crisis that devastated our economy in 2008, it, Merrill Lynch, and Countrywide sold billions of dollars of RMBS [residential mortgage-backed...

Does it make sense to require a park campground operator that has a few hundred employees at 120 different locations to come up with 120 separate affirmative-action plans, one for each site? Just because it also receives a measly $52,000 federal contract to clean bathrooms used by tourists (which it does very cheaply, at cost, in order to make its nearby concessions more attractive)?

To any economist, the answer would be “no.” But to the Obama administration, the answer is “yes.” If a federal contractor gets $50,000 annually from the federal government, or “serves as a depository of Government funds in any amount” or has “government bills of lading” worth $50,000, it generally has to have a separate affirmative action plan for “each of its...